Business relationships and communications are driven by productivity software used in the creation of documents and other written exchanges between organizations and individuals. Commonly, productivity software, such as word processing, spreadsheet, email, presentation, and Web browsing applications, are installed on personal computers and similar programmable devices.
Each personal computer or computing device provides a computing system environment within which content can be presented, manipulated, and modified. Provisions for accessing the content and controlling an application are provided through a graphical user interface using a single or combination of application windows, within which text can be entered through a keyboard and the application controlled through the keyboard or by a pointing device, such as a mouse, track pad, or trackball. Other user input and control devices are possible.
Application-specific controls are generally provided as an integral part of the screen interface and are presented along the top, bottom, or side margins of a main application window through buttons, toggles, scroll boxes, pull-down menus, and other user controls, which manage program options, user selections, and environmental information. Extended information is often provided through visually-separate windows, such as pop-up dialog or adjacently-appearing sidebar windows, through which help, tutorial, file system navigation, file property, and other supplemental information is presented.
In particular, sidebar-style windows can provide valuable context about documents currently in use. Ideally, the value of the information provided inside a sidebar should offset the cost of the distraction in terms of screen space and time spent glancing over to the sidebar from the main application window. If poorly styled, a sidebar can be distracting to a user. For example, the physical distance of a sidebar from the primary material in use can be critical due to the limited screen space available to an application. Placing a sidebar too distant from the primary material may require both considerable eye travel and significant pointer device travel, which reduces the information's value and the usefulness of interacting with the sidebar. As well, the material relevance of information in a sidebar is frequently removed from the immediate state of the current task and often not sufficiently related to the immediate task at hand to warrant causing user distraction. Finally, visual “bouncing” can occur when a user moves between several active application windows and a sidebar may appear to rapidly reposition itself as the window focus changes, thus creating visual distraction. Due to such concerns, a sidebar may be disabled, yet the value of the sidebar is lost when turned off, thereby rendering potentially useful tangential information, such as document versions available, document authorship, related documents available in the same folder or Website or on the same topic, annotations available, what other users are saying about the document, and other information unavailable.
Accordingly, what is needed is an approach to providing a sidebar window that operates within the close context of a document provided in a primary application window within behaviors adapted to minimize user distraction.